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Month: November 2018

When I was younger I was constantly wary of political discussions. This was partly my anxiety but also a feeling that I was young and inexperienced and hadn’t worked everything out yet. Looking back I get the impression that I understood things better than many and was quite needlessly anxious. I am now happy to engage in discussions and even hopeful someone will raise an argument that will make me thing again.

Looking back my family also surprise me. Half of my family are Tories and they never made the effort to explain the conservative argument to me. I just got the impression that I would get it when I was older. Yet I had always got it, it just didn’t tally with what the UK government was doing at the time.

I did grow up to be interested in science and am hopefully capable of analysing issues rigorously. Probably all scientists wake up at some point and realise that most people don’t do this. Scientists don’t decide elections, people who haven’t done the analysis do. The problem with democracy is that people elect people who make the right noises and thus satisfy people that they are on their side and understand their concerns. Sadly the modern politician is adept at creating the impression rather than being a good analyser and decision maker.

We now have the draft Brexit deal, but it seems few are happy. This was what a slim majority after a very poor debate wanted wasn’t it? It’s very confusing. I think the problem is a lack of proper analysis. A simple conclusion is reached that ‘feels right’ and if you also feel part of a majority then why look deeper?

The UK is in decline. I think it is quite natural for societies in decline to look back to the past and look for what was better in the past and what has changed to see if a beneficial tradition has been dropped. In contrast a rising society may look back and see what is now better about the society.

sometimes i think that Brexit goes somethign like this: The UK is in decline. There are more people from the rest of the EU than there used to be. Therefore the UK is in decline because of immigration from the EU. So, to reverse the decline the UK should reduce immigration from the EU, hence Brexit.

Now of course, there isn’t necessarily any connection between the two premises, so there is no logical path to the conclusion. It may very well leave to a false positive, a correlation that fits the facts, but has no real connection with them.

However if you look deeply enough there is a connection. A society that relies on importing labour for specific jobs vital to the economy is not in a sustainable position. That the Brexiteers never talk about this, suggests that they simply want the false conclusion ‘feel right’ so that they support Brexit. It’s not somethign that should happen in a healthy democracy.

The other aspect of this looking back to the past for answers is that it raises nostalgia for periods of the past. Last week was the centenary of the end of the First World War. There was a focus on how united Britain was about entering that war, how easily Britons enlisted into the armed services to fight for ‘King and Country’ in a way that is unforeseeable in modern Britain. This notion of a united Britain is appealing.

What simply galls me is that Brexit is the antithesis of promoting unity. It’s been the most divisive political issue and bringing that discussion into the open has been damaging to British society. The EU is by no means perfect and I’ve always argued for a looser set of arrangements, however the EU is not the cause of what ails Britain, the Brexit argument is a false positive. A genuinely united nation which works towards the goal of re-building British society is the alternative and all this Brexit division and mess is just a distraction form the real work the UK needs to embark upon. The Brexiteers have scapegoated those whom oppose them as the problem, it’s a form of fascism. They who are wealthy enough to not be bothered about a decline in the British economy.

We need to re-build democracy from the bottom up and this is very much not what the chief proponents of Brexit want, they haven’t even bothered to make any sort of case for how to improve Britain outside of the EU. We need more people to look beyond the first simple answer that at first glance appears to address the problem and ‘feels right’. The world is much more complicated than that and we simply need genuine politicians who care about the whole of the economy and society who are not simply populists or public relations experts.